Video compositing may involve blending one or more video components with a graphics background that may have multiple graphics elements. For example, the video components may include a main video that fully covers a video plane and a picture-in-picture (PIP) video that may be displayed on a portion of the video plane. The graphics background may include a graphics plane that may contain a number of graphics elements, such as images, text boxes, user interfaces (UIs), and texts in various formats. In existing set top box (STB) platforms, compositing usage cases may be quite simple. For example, the video and graphics planes may be provided and the order of the planes from top to bottom may be specified, and the blending may be performed on a per-pixel basis. This may work fine for traditional usage cases, where UI or closed captioning may be used on top of video.
The video and graphics industry, however, appears to be moving away from the traditional usage cases and are pushing for much more flexible models, especially in terms of graphics. For example, the customers may demand blending of multiple graphics surfaces and multiple video surfaces in various orders, which breaks the assumption of a single graphics plane, and if not properly handled may significantly impact the bandwidth, performance, and/or complexity.